Toast Meaning

"Tea was a very special institution, revolving as it did around the ceremony and worship of Toast. In [public schools] where alcohol, tobacco and drugs were forbidden, it was essential that something should take their place as a powerful and public totem of virility and cool. Toast, for reasons lost in time, was the substance chosen." — 1991, Stephen Fry, The Liar, page 23:

"The evening meal was "a repast of most recherché description," involving an endless series of toasts to almost everybody (with the notable exception of the other railway already serving Brentford, which came in for some hard knocks from various speakers)." — 1960 February 26, R. K. Kirkland, “The Great Western and Brentford Railway”, in Railway Magazine, page 79:

"Josephine Baker did not become the toast of Paris by just shaking her booty for some theater gypsies as a party wound down." — 2014 May 28, John McWhorter, “Saint Maya”, in The New Republic, →ISSN:

"In the script, as the Ghostbusters train their proton blasters on Gozer, Murray's character says, "That's it! I'm gonna turn this guy into toast." By the time the scene was shot, the filmmakers had decided the human form of Gozer should be played by the model Slavitza Jovan. Murray improvised various comments about her, including changing the line in the script to "This chick is toast." The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes Murray's ad-lib as the earliest known occurrence of "toast" with the modern meaning, calling the usage "proleptic."" — Ben Zimmer (22 June 2023), “'Toast': From Busting Ghosts to Burning Careers”, in The Wall Street Journal, New York, N.Y.: Dow Jones & Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 24 Jun 2023:

"He [P. Hegseth] said the Iranian regime “are toast, and they know it, or at least soon enough, they will know it.”" — 2026 March 4, Joseph Gedeon, quoting Pete Hegseth, “Pete Hegseth says Iranian regime is ‘toast’ as US expands military offensive”, in The Guardian, →ISSN: